Standing Out Through Nature's Magnetism with Jamie Mustard Part 1 (of 2)
“Nature magnetizes you into the present”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM jamie
Jamie Mustard is an expert on getting thru, and making it stick. He is the world’s leading authority on perception in the physical world. Steeped in the worlds of technology, product engagement, and the creative arts, Jamie consults with leading companies, CEOs, creative artists, etc., getting their messages, products, brands and ideas to STAND OUT to their desired audiences. He helps build focused and immediately effective business practices to help you get heard. In his bestselling and O.W.L Award-winning book, The ICONIST: The Art and Science of Standing Out, he uses case studies in business and pop culture, in addition to his extensive scientific research, to explore how BLOCKS™ solve one of our most crucial problems: Being made invisible.
From invisibility to solving INvisibility
“I'll start by saying that coming to nature, and it was a huge catalyst for me, led to a major part of my practice today. I don't think there would be a book if I had not made a decision to return to nature. I was a kid that was abandoned by their parents. I grew up in and around urban downtown Los Angeles. I was a child of illiteracy, poverty, neglect, the worst slums that you could imagine.. I spent very little time in school and was dealing with literacy issues into my late teens. I was given an opportunity to try to help repair my life, which was very hard to face with that level of deprivation and being that far behind, but I eventually went on to graduate from the London School of Economics. Now I consult as an art director, communications expert, and an amplifier for some of the biggest minds and brands in the world, so it's a very, very, very humble beginning.
It's kept me humble, and no one is in more disbelief as to what I do now than me. I never thought that the life that I have now would be something that would be a possible or available for me. I always thought the people that were able to do grand things, even if they grew up poor like me were anointed. Eventually I figured out that I would have to anoint myself and that's what's happened.
I’m from the concrete jungle. You would have driven by me 15 times and I would have been invisible, and I felt invisible. I think there's a great irony to the fact that now because of information overload, no one can find us and we fill angst because of it. So there's a great irony that after being so invisible as a child, I now teach some of the biggest brands and leaders. Now, all of us are invisible no matter what class we are, because we all compete with information overload, and I'm the one that I came up with these primal laws that solve that. That connection of being invisible and now I solve invisibility for people of all classes is a very strange thing.
The practice of nature had something to do with that, in the sense that when I was 12 years old, we moved from urban Los Angeles to Eugene, Oregon. And all of a sudden trees and wet and green were my environment. It impacted me, and 10 years ago when my life was not going the way that I wanted and my work was not getting done…I moved back to Oregon and it's the work that I've done in nature in a beautiful green setting that has quieted my mind and allowed me to focus and has led to everything that I'm achieving right now, which is in a lot of ways, my wildest dreams.”
magnetizing you into the present
“I lived in New York, I lived in London, I lived in Los Angeles. And when you live in these places, you're kind of taught that they're the center of the universe, but really it’s like living on a lightbulb. Nature and animals, force you without your knowledge, they magnetize you into the present. They make you present. So with all of the distractions that were going on around me in these big places, I had all of these influences from these big places, which were a huge part of my work, but I wasn't getting the work done. So I came to a place where there wouldn't be all those distractions. And every time I left my home, I would be forced to be present.
I was talking to a buddy of mine who's one of the most successful public speakers in the world, his name is Kevin Carroll. He's got a book called The Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, which I recommend for everyone. He was a guy that was abandoned by his parents that became the head trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers, and now he's represented by Washington Speakers Bureau and the Creative Artists Agency for public speaking, and he's one of the probably top five public speakers in the world. I asked him,
“Hey man, you do it pretty well for yourself, you don't have to live here, you could live anywhere. You don't have to leave here if you live in New York..”
He's like, “Yeah, but if I go to New York, then I have to get up to go home, and I'm traveling so much from my speaking... When I land, I have to get up to go home.”
I was like, “Yeah, but you could get a place in the Hamptons, you're doing well, you can get a place at the Fire Island Montauk.”
And he said, “Jamie, when I come and I fly back into PDX, when I fly back into Portland, I exhale.”
So I think that's a good way to describe it. I'm able to exhale. And when you write and you teach and you craft art, which is what I do all day, every day. You spend a lot of time alone in a room. Most people, when they see me, it's because I'm doing some sort of public speaking events or something, and they think that that's my life, and then I have this really hip life, but really, I don't... It's really me alone in a room all the time making stuff, and then 1% of my time is spent doing the public speaking, which everybody sees, which is almost seem superficial compared to how I actually live my life, which Kevin Carroll would call doing the unglamorous work.”
the practice of ideating
“At this point, Nature is part of my practice, it's a highly intentional thing. I live 20 minutes from this place called the Columbia Gorge. I've been all over the world, and this is one of the most beautiful places on God's green earth. It looks, this place looks like God took their finger nail and just scratch it along the surface of the Earth, creating this incredible glacial river. Going in the afternoon and constantly putting myself in that environment while I'm visualizing and while I'm ideating is a massive part of my practice. No matter how I'm feeling, I go into those environments, and it forces me to be present. By the time it’s hours later, and I'm back at my car, I’m writing down notes of the ideas that I have while I’m there never come to me otherwise.
At times when we're living and we're trying to accomplish their goals and we're trying to come up with our dreams, we can often suffer from two problems. One is, we can be stuck in the past. The biggest part of coming from poverty is you get into a pattern habit. That's the hardest part of breaking out of it. You get stuck in the past. Or, when you're really ambitious, you get over obsessed with the future. Well, for me to write and be alone in a room and create great art, I have to be completely engaged. I have to be able to put myself into a flow state at will. It's taken me 15 years of practice before I could induce a flow state almost at will. So what nature does is it forces you out of being in the past all the time, and it keeps you from obsessing over the future.”
amplifying visualization
“One of the things that I figured out is a huge part of getting what you want, that has to work in tandem with hard work, is visualization. Whenever I go into nature, I do my visualizing, I start seeing in my mind what I want to achieve, because I'm present. I do believe that my visualization is amplified because I'm doing it present.
When I go into nature, I can take a step back, do less, and focus on the things that I want to be focused on, not the things that are just carrying me along. That's one of the reasons that I keep growing, is because I don't get caught in that pattern, where I'm constantly being swept along. I'm constantly taking a step back and going, Is this what I wanna be doing? And nature is a huge part of that practice. I find that when I talk about digitalization, I'm talking about me imagining what I want to happen in concert with my work, and I find that that stuff tends to take in a way that almost feels providential when I'm doing it from nature. I'm not seeing the things that I want to be seeing that I want to even be doing, if I'm not going into nature.”
disconnected in the midst of connectivity
“We've all been ordered into our homes. We've all been locked up, we’re getting more and more on to the Zoom calls, connecting Zoom to Zoom. The more we have these connective technologies, the more we've seen pre-teen and teen suicide rates and depression skyrocket. So what's going on here? We have all this connectivity through social media and video calls, but we're more disconnected than we've ever been before. We are animals, we have 100 to 2000 years of evolutionary biology, where we lived in nature. It's only the last 300 years where we've lived in these constructed polyester synthetic environments. That is a drip of water, it's a drip of time, in how we've evolved as human beings. We are not supposed to be living indoors, talking to each other through video, talking to each other on computers.
We are the most ourselves, when we are in our most primal and evolutionary environment, which is the natural environment. This is why we all go on vacation to nature. Why are we going on vacation to nature? We should not be living our lives in artificial shells, and then making ourselves look healthy in the sun once a year for two to three weeks. It's insane. We have to understand that we're creatures of evolutionary biology. We lived in nature for 100 to 2000 years for far, far, far, far less than 1% of that, we've been in the synthetic environments. It's completely foreign and alien of the way that we should be living a human existence. Being in nature and being in our actual habitat is not something that needs to be this thing that we do once in a while over there, that we have to get to when we have time, it has to be the base of who we are.”
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